We have an exceptionally interesting guest today: a dual-chip XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics card from Club 3D company. eXtreme Graphics Innovation is a new player on the highly competitive 3D graphics market, who decided to break and enter the scene with an expensive dual-GPU part. Historically graphics cards with two processors were able to demonstrate exceptional performance, but were quoted at a very high price-point. Dual-chip products on XGI Technology do not cost more than competitors’ single-chip offerings, but are they really fast in today’s games and have a bright future? Find it out with us!

Synthetic Benchmarks: Pixel Shader Performance

Now let’s check our well our today’s hero can cope with pixel shaders:

The per-pixel lighting using shader version 2.0 appears a total fiasco: even the morally and technically outdated GeForce FX 5600 Ultra easily outperforms the new Volari solution. However, when we shift to simple shaders our hero proves much more successful and surpasses both youngest NVIDIA cards.

I dare suppose that XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra features similar weak spots as GeForce FX, because its graph is shaped just like the one of GeForce FX: it looks like a small hump, where the decrease indicates noticeable performance drop when we shift to shader version 2.0.

When we disable Z writes the overall picture remains unchanged.

However, when we disable color writes, all graphics cards except Volari speed up almost hitting their theoretical maximum. Frankly speaking, the graph for Club3D solution makes us think that it doesn’t work correctly in our benchmark. Or maybe its “unique” architecture simply doesn’t allow disabling the color writes completely. Or maybe it is all about the unfinished drivers, although this is the most unlikely supposition for this low-level benchmark.